President Obama Is the One Who Is Wrong About Fast Track and the TPP | The Nation
President Obama takes it personally when Americans disagree with his free-trade fundamentalism. He keeps griping about the activists who usually support his agenda but are passionately opposed to his request for “fast-track” authority to bypass congressional input and oversight on a sweeping Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal. And the president is even more upset that Democratic members of Congress are, for the most part, aligning with the activists rather than the White House.
“There have been a bunch of critics about trade deals generally and the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” he told the crowd that was assembled last week for his appearance at the corporate headquarters of Nike, a US-based firm that (with its contractors) now employs roughly 40 overseas workers for every one American...
The people the president says are “wrong” -- a group that includes Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and most House Democrats -- are not unthinking protectionists or crude isolationists. They are supporters of workers, the environment, and human rights in the United States and abroad. They have come to recognize that, while fair trade holds immense promise, free trade along the lines the United States has practiced it in recent decades has done immense damage.
The most ardent opponents of fast track and the TPP have first-hand experience with failed trade policies. They have seen what the North American Free Trade Agreement, the permanent normalization of trade with China and other trade arrangements have done to their communities.Their current position is rooted in an understanding that, as Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison (a co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and an early supporter of Obama’s 2008 presidential run) says, “We cannot afford to rush through another NAFTA that values corporate profits above families.”
As a presidential candidate in 2008, Obama visited many of those communities and stood side-by-side with many of the leading opponents of ill-conceived and poorly administered trade agreements. He decried “a Washington where decades of trade deals like NAFTA and China have been signed with plenty of protections for corporations and their profits, but none for our environment or our workers who’ve seen factories shut their doors and millions of jobs disappear…”
Now, Obama suggests that those he sided with in 2008 are clueless in 2015.
That is not the case.
read more: http://www.thenation.com/blog/206897/president-obama-one-who-wrong-about-fast-track-and-tpp
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